Activists and politicians at New York City are issuing dire warnings about the city’s treasured parks and not-so-treasured public restrooms as the city makes deep budget cuts to pay for the uncontrolled influx of migrants. Public restrooms are increasingly appearing as they did during New York’s nadir in the 1970s and 1980s, activists warn, as they are now being cleaned weekly instead of daily.To grapple with the expected $12 billion dollar migrant-related expenditures, the city on Monday voted to slash the budgets of a number of departments. Among them is the Department of Public and Recreation, which will have its budget cut by 5 percent. The parks cuts, which were proposed by Mayor Adams, will result in public facilities no longer being cleaned daily. The New York City Councilman and Parks Committee chairman, Shekar Krishnan, stated Monday during a finance committee hearing that the city will be cutting clean-up services across the five boroughs. “Our parks now, instead of being cleaned seven days a week, will be cleaned one day a week,” Mr. Krishnan said during the hearing, “The 17,000 trash cans in parks across our city will be overflowing.”A spokesman for the City’s Department of Parks & Recreation told the Sun to “expect staffing cuts to have an effect on park maintenance” but that “it is too early to estimate the exact impact on schedule.”A public restroom activist, Theodora Siegel, documents the state of New York City bathrooms on Instagram. She recently posted a photo of a park toilet stall strewn with urine-soaked toilet paper. Ms. Siegel remarked that the stall was “not even that bad comparatively speaking” to what the activist documents in public parks throughout the city. She added, however, that the decline in public maintenance to bathrooms and trash bins will make public parks across the five boroughs “virtually unusable.” “This will have an extremely negative impact on the parks and the people who use them,” Ms. Siegel opined. The recent cuts to the parks could repeat similar patterns that, as the New York Times has detailed, plagued public facilities during the Covid pandemic. Shortly after the City slashed the Park Department’s budget by $84 million dollars, the Times photographed large buildups of trash across public spaces in all five boroughs. The 14 percent cut to the department’s budget was enough to cause residents trying to enjoy one Bronx city park to have to bring rakes and trash bins to pick up the litter near where they tried sitting.Ms. Siegel, who runs the public bathroom review page on Instagram, got2go, has been outspoken regarding the dearth of restrooms available to the public at the Big Apple. In an opinion piece the activist penned in the Times, she claims the city’s public facilities were poor and have only gotten worse. “Budget cuts in New York City shuttered public toilets in the 1970s. Citywide attempts to build more restrooms have struggled ever since,” she wrote. “The Covid pandemic made access only worse when the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] closed all 69 of the public restrooms in its subway stations,” Ms. Siegel said. “Almost three years later, it just opened up nine subway bathrooms.”The City’s most recent budget cuts to the Parks Department were among the city-wide budget reductions that the mayor states are the result of the recent migrant crisis. In addition to parks, public facilities like libraries, schools, and health services will all be experiencing similar cuts in services. Much of the shortfall has been spurred by the estimated $12 billion dollars the city expects to spend providing services to the nearly 100 thousand migrants who have made it to the five boroughs from the southern border, according to Mr. Adams. Among other city programs impacted will be New York’s education services. City-provided preschool and middle school programming are among the cuts made by the Education Department that represent a $570 million dollar budget decrease in the latest fiscal year.
